Today's been a hard day. I've been up and down, up and down, with very little forward momentum. I've been feeling stuck, like I'm spinning my wheels, because I'm not sure where to go. I tried to do some digging on where to go, only to be told to wait at every instance.
Patience is not my strong suit. I don't wait easily or well. I do it because I must, but "wait" is a bitch of an answer.
In a way, I feel depressed. Not the usual version of fear and old sad creeping over me. This one is an honest fear of the future. I don't recall a time I've ever feared the future. Feared the present, hated the idea of the future, and ran at all costs to stop an undesirable future, but straight through the gut fear.
I have a lot riding on this test. I pretty much only get one shot to get it right. I should do fine with some review, but I fear fucking it up. I fear losing the chance at an awesome job by not being good enough. I feel like this is my right path, but I'm not sure of the next right step. I don't want to fuck this up. Paralysis by analysis. At least with the FE, I has seen it recently enough that I felt good about it. Same goes for the APs and CLEPs. I haven't touched some of this stuff in over a decade, nearly 15 year. This test means I need to face my past with biology, that most loathed subject. It means facing some facts I've held long true about myself and breaking them down.
I need to face that I do well with facts, even rote memorized facts. I do it well everywhere else.
8th grade biology are the only classes I've failed a marking period for in straight science. I almost failed that same marking period in history and math (I need to remember what made 8th grade an emotional struggle.) I failed the basic structures course. Twice. I despise structures as well. I hate the things that prove I'm not perfect or that carry reminders of that.
There are memories attached to those early failures. I would have preferred yelling to the disappointed looks. I would have preferred a beating to the blame and shame I heaped upon myself, far more than m parents gave me. My parents never saw my college grades. I never showed them off. They weren't what I wanted to show them. Again, I heaped shame upon myself. I called myself every name in the book. I told myself that I must be stupid for not getting it. I told myself I wasn't worthy of certain things I enjoyed and grounded myself away from them. You know what the grades were that caused so much havoc? A 69 and a 68 out of 100. So fucking close. I still would have chastised myself for a 70, but nowhere near as badly. That at least was passing. I shredded my psyche for every C and obliterated myself for a failing grade. They meant I wasn't perfect, and that couldn't happen.
So I rationalized. Internalized. Obviously I wasn't good at biology. Why wasn't I good at biology? All the rote memorization without explanation of why things worked the way they did.
A while back, I picked up a genetics text and a biochem text. I was determined to get to the heart of why biology worked and fix that preconception by giving myself the whys. I never got very far. I kept running up against that preconceived "I'm bad at biology" and giving myself excuses not to do it.
So, my next trick is breaking down that wall I created. (Remembering what fucked up my 8th grade year wouldn't be a bad thing either.)
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